NewsMavens

Projects

PortugalPúblico – Comunicação Social, S.A.

P24 by Público

P24 is Público’s personalised audio catch-up for its readers. It refreshes throughout the day and produces audio clips of stories that are customised to each individual reader, as well as providing the main stories of the day. The project is Público’s answer to the problem of how to better serve an audience on the go; one who may not have time to constantly check the website throughout the day, and who may miss important news as a result. After initial research, audio was picked as the best medium to solve the issue, and Público has identified it as a key platform for the future of the publication.

The Bureau Local

Central to The Bureau Local project is the intention to encourage the spread of ambitious data-driven local journalism. While many local media outlets are being shut down and resources centralised, The Bureau Local is driven by the essential desire to hold power to account at a local level; to make press more representative of those they represent. They do this by supporting a network of key local journalists - from traditional media outlets to bloggers - and providing vital data sets, statisticians and graphic designers to help local journalists yield investigative stories that might also resonate nationally.

POST

POST is a tool that will help journalists measure the success of their own content. It was born out of a question: what is the most pressing issue facing editors and how could the agency do something to help? Edenspiekermann already closely collaborates with newsrooms across Europe. By talking to their partner organisations they identified that a key problem in newsrooms was how to integrate analytics on day-to-day basis for already busy journalists. POST aims to make life easier for journalists by giving them help at exactly the right moment.

Go Digital - Digital skills for small publishers (Round 4)

Smaller publishers face serious constraints in digital because of the lack of investment in technology and digital skills. The new Go Digital publishing platform will allow local and regional media players to have access to a state of the art solution for monetising their digital content.

ASK AND EARN (Round 4)

Publishers face the challenge of attracting subscribers. It’s hard for publishers to find ways to persuade users to sign up on the website. Online registration is an important first step to building user loyalty and collecting the quality data needed to enhance the on-site experience. With this project, users are incentivised to visit and interact with Krone’s website, which will lead to an uplift of signups. The project will also gather quality first-party data through different datapoints to provide a better experience for users and better and more plentiful targeting options for advertisers.

Smart sections - Renewing the value of content (Round 4)

This project aims to address the global issue of differentiation for newsrooms providing high-quality or specialised news: the systematic presence on their pages of advertisements that are identical from one site to another across the web leads to a strong trivialisation of their offer, and data leakage. By recapturing these spaces and inventing new offers it enables readers to accept the move to paid content, and helps gain trust about data protection.

AdBoard - Helping news publishers manage ads (Round 4)

For many news publishers with native advertising comes one question: how can they avoid compromising their news DNA with brand messages? This dilemma has played out in favour of the entertainment media industry, which has adopted native advertising more quickly. AdBoard aims to change that by being the hands-on tool for news publishers to optimise native ads and attract new revenue streams. In this relatively new environment, AdBoard helps them navigate by making informed decisions. Each quarter performance indexes and AdBoard users’ anonymised data will be put together and released, along with a native ad barometer, as a reference for news publishers. These will help the overall industry gain leverage and develop insights about their campaigns’ engagement.

Context is King - The Halo effect of premium news websites (Round 4)

In a world that is dominated by programmatic advertising, it's difficult to distinguish premium news brands with high-quality editorial content from non-premium brands. In this framework the two largest news publishers in Belgium are joining forces to launch a research project that demonstrates the value of premium news websites. The research should demonstrate that the perception of high-quality news sites radiates on advertising brands (Halo effect). Many foreign advertisers are not familiar with local media. Editors on the other hand are not pleased with inappropriate advertising next to their editorial content, and readers find it disturbing. Based on the research, premium news sites would be awarded a label so that foreign advertisers can recognise them more easily.

Mittmedia’s challenge is to create sustainable monetisation of their paid content business by combining high conversion of new paying customers with a lowering of churn rates among existing paying customers. This project will create a data service that uses available user interaction and content data, applies machine learning, and enables the creation of individually personalised content products that – in a proven value chain – will convert more new paying customers and lower churn rates.

Smart Paywall - Understanding audience better (Round 4)

Global Media Group is one of the biggest media companies in Portugal with 12 brands operating in print, digital and radio. In the recent past, GMG has grown an audience of over 9 million monthly unique visitors, boosting advertising revenue streams. It is now able to reach the most plural set of readers in the country, yet struggles on how best to sell them its digital portfolio. Smart Paywall will combine a single sign-on platform with segmented data and a new paywall to sell GMG content, services and products more efficiently. In addition, GMG’s newsrooms will be able to innovate digital packages like never before with the key analytical information provided.

Smarter Paywall 2018 - For local content (Round 4)

As a local publisher with a large proportion of local content, but also publishing significant stories of national reach, Groupes Les Echoes is looking to better align its paywall with its subscription incentives (local content) without crossing the line into a freemium approach, and without harming its reach in mass-appeal articles that have direct competition. This project will attempt to lift consumption of local content – through personalised content discovery – and apply a more carefully considered metering strategy that aims at discerning ‘convertable’ scenarios from less valuable ones.

Many media companies are already experimenting with rule-based ‘Dynamic Paygates’ that show different conversion messages or offers to users. However, these paygates are not scalable because the more users a publisher wants to address personally, the more marketing personnel are needed to build all the rules behind those customer journeys. The project tackles this problem by combining algorithms with the Dynamic Paygate, making the system more efficient. It's then able to test virtually limitless combinations of message, offer and visualisation to convert a potential buyer. By addressing every user individually, NZZ will be able to accompany a user less intrusively on their journey, lowering the barriers to conversion.